![]() You must become what has been called a walker, beatnik, or survivor of a dystopian reality that denies reality itself. You can only get out of such a society if you start walking away from the centers of power - and from everything that ties you to the system. The printers are, of course, remote-controlled by an artificial intelligence that, if it is able to x-ray its customers, it is because they are nothing more than a collection of data. ![]() Agencia Getty (Getty Images for Unfinished Live) Cory Doctorow at a conference in Berlin in 2015. ![]() In other words, restaurants automatically adapt their menus to the customer’s taste, and everything is “printed,” not “made,” as 3D printers do all the work. Or it might be the same, but subtly sophisticated. The three meet at a communist gathering - the only thing left of communism in that apparently perfect future: pretend solidarity parties - and abandon what’s known as “society by default.” The world Doctorow imagines is so similar to our own that it could not be any other. In Walkaway, it happens that Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson - and so on to complete the 21 names of the protagonist of the story, better known as Etcetera precisely because of that - and his best friend, Seth, decide to join Natalie, a rich heiress who inevitably rebels. That’s why awareness is so important, Doctorow says. “There are people deciding what is and isn’t true in our lives based on data that they illicitly mine, and that reinforces an idea of the world that goes in the opposite direction of what you’re trying to build,” he explains. Thus, he explains, when the DVD Forum - an organization founded in 1995 that included hardware, software, the media, and Hollywood itself - decided on which televisions the “spy” boards would be installed to discover what content to favor, it prioritized or “only included families with at least four members, who lived in, say, London, and could afford an in-car screen.” “If you were born in Manila and you have a son building a stadium in Qatar, what you see on TV doesn’t matter in the slightest to them, because they don’t consider you a family,” he adds. “When they only take into account those they consider as such,” he adds. You are complicating things for all those straight, white, rich men, the usual elites, who are still behind everything that we consider the world today,” says Doctorow, who recalls - via video call from his home in Los Angeles - that it is the mechanisms of the system that end up deciding, for example, what is and what is not a family. Somehow, with a name like that, you’re hacking the system. ![]() “The longer your name is, the more untraceable you become. If his daughter’s name - Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow - is almost as interminable as that of the protagonist of his latest novel, the powerful dystopian Walkaway (Tor Books) - a sumptuous mix of Bret Easton Ellis, Douglas Coupland and Dave Eggers - it is because he wants to be able to throw data collectors off the scent as much as possible. It is imposing a default reality, trying to reimpose that which is being fought against while keeping us entertained,” he says. “There may be changes in the world, but, in the background, there is a current that we don’t control. “We are not free, and we don’t know it,” says the writer, for whom Mark Zuckerberg and his virtual conglomerate - his budding metaverse - tramples relentlessly over a new kind of human right that is not talked about enough. Cory Doctorow, science fiction writer, “zuckervegan” and digital rights activist, can’t believe that the rest of the world lives as if it is not just a collection of data being bought and sold behind its back all the time. ![]()
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